The Darkness Awakens on Christmas: 30+ Supernatural Thrillers, Mysteries & Eerie Ghost Stories
Victorian and Edwardian Ghostly Mysteries for Winter NightsBy Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, M. R. James, Saki, Sabine Baring-Gould, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Fergus Hume, John Kendrick Bangs, Jerome K. Jerome, Leonard Kip, Catherine Crowe, Lucie E. Jackson, William Douglas O'Connor, Frank R. Stockton, James Bowker, Grant Allen, Louisa M. Alcott, Florence Marryat, Katherine Rickford, J. M. Barrie, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, George MacDonald, Bithia Mary Croker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Catherine L. Pirkis, E. F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood
Length44h 35m
About this audiobook
The Darkness Awakens on Christmas gathers more than thirty supernatural thrillers, mysteries, and ghost stories around the unsettling conjunction of winter festivity and spectral dread. Its range extends from Gothic apparitions and antiquarian enigmas to ironic Christmas hauntings, psychological suspense, and macabre domestic tales. Against the warmth customarily associated with the season, these narratives cultivate darkness, secrecy, memory, and the intrusion of the uncanny; particularly striking are their recurrent images of haunted houses, ominous revels, and revenants disturbing holiday repose. The contributors represent a remarkably broad nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American field, bringing together major practitioners of the Victorian ghost story, Gothic romance, sensation fiction, detective narrative, comic fantasy, and supernatural tale. Their collective work reflects the period's fascination with spiritualism, medieval survivals, modern urban anxiety, and the unstable boundary between rational explanation and supernatural possibility. Women and men writing across popular and literary traditions alike enrich the volume, demonstrating how Christmas fiction became a potent forum for exploring family, class, guilt, inheritance, and cultural unease. This anthology is highly recommended for readers and students of Gothic literature, Victorian culture, and the history of short fiction. Within a single volume, it offers an illuminating multiplicity of styles and perspectives, inviting comparison between terror and humor, detection and haunting, sentiment and dread. Its conversations across genres make it both pleasurable seasonal reading and a valuable guide to the enduring literary power of Christmas darkness.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 4.3 (12)
Includes Amazon
GenreHorror, Fantasy
Length44 hrs 35 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateDec 3, 2018
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Dark Christmas Collection: 30+ Supernatural Thrillers, Mysteries & Ghost Stories
2The Silver Hatchet (Arthur Conan Doyle)
3What the Shepherd Saw: A Tale of Four Moonlight Nights (Thomas Hardy)
4Markheim (Robert Louis Stevenson)
5The Wolves of Cernogratz (Saki)
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6Mustapha (Sabine Baring-Gould)
7The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance (M.R. James)
8The Christmas Banquet (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
9The Haunted Man (Charles Dickens)
10Chapter I. The Gift Bestowed
11Chapter II. The Gift Diffused
12Chapter III. The Gift Reversed
13Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions (Charles Dickens)
14Chapter I. To Be Taken Immediately
15Chapter II. Not to Be Taken at Bed-Time
16Chapter III. To Be Taken at the Dinner-Table
17Chapter IV. Not to Be Taken for Granted
18Chapter V. To Be Taken in Water
19Chapter VI. To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt
20Chapter VII. To Be Taken and Tried
21Chapter VIII. To Be Taken for Life
22The Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens) (pt. 1)
23The Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens) (pt. 2)
24The Ghost’s Touch (Fergus Hume)
25Glámr (Sabine Baring-Gould)
26The Ghosts at Grantley (Leonard Kip)
27A Terrible Christmas Eve (Lucie E. Jackson)
28Ghosts and Family Legends (Catherine Crowe) (pt. 1)
29Ghosts and Family Legends (Catherine Crowe) (pt. 2)
30Ghosts and Family Legends (Catherine Crowe) (pt. 3)
31The Ghost: A Christmas Story (William Douglas O’Connor)
32Thurlow’s Christmas Story (John Kendrick Bangs)
33The Mystery of My Grandmother’s Hair Sofa (John Kendrick Bangs)
34The Abbot’s Ghost; or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation (Louisa M. Alcott)
35Chapter I. Dramatis Personae
36Chapter II. Byplay
37Chapter III. Who Was It?
38Chapter IV. Feeding the Peacocks
39Chapter V. Under the Mistletoe
40Chapter VI. Miracles
41Chapter VII. A Ghostly Revel
42Chapter VIII. Jasper
43Old Applejoy's Ghost (Frank R. Stockton)
44Wolverden Tower (Grant Allen)
45The Christmas-Eve Vigil (James Bowker)
46Told After Supper (Jerome K. Jerome)
47The Box with the Iron Clamps (Florence Marryat)
48Joseph: A Story (Katherine Rickford)
49The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton (Charles Dickens)
50The Ghost of Christmas Eve (J. M. Barrie)
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